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A comment on U.S. Postal Service starts nationwide electric vehicle fleet, buying 9,250 EVs. Parent comment

Re:U.S. Postal Service starts nationwide electric vehicle fl... by mcv on Thursday March 02, 2023 @08:02AM (#34995142)
It's entirely possible that Belgium is different. PostNL has also always had cars and vans, but I've also seen them use bikes of various types for as long as I can remember. Of course before the advent of cargo bikes and especially cargo e-bikes, bikes were of course mostly limited to delivering letters, but they definitely did that. Lately they've been moving to bigger and bigger cargo bikes, presumably in order to use less cars, even for larger packages.

But they also used bikes way back when they were still called PTT: https://www.transportfiets.net/2007/06/27/postfietsen-van-de... https://i.pinimg.com/474x/5c/00/9f/5c009f57703d05c367078d55e...

But on this search, I can even spot some Belgian mail deliverers on bicycles: https://www.google.com/search?q=postbode+op+fiets

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Re:U.S. Postal Service starts nationwide electric vehicle fl... by vanderZwan on Thursday March 02, 2023 @09:06AM (#34995772)
I suspect that the rise of on-line shopping has also drastically increased the need for cars then
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Re:U.S. Postal Service starts nationwide electric vehicle fl... by mcv on Thursday March 02, 2023 @11:20AM (#34997703)
Oh definitely! Sending/receiving large packages used to be rare. Mail ordering has existed for a while, but didn't really explode to replace nearly all of retail until the rise of webshops.

And I've seen lots of discussions about whether it's wasteful to have things delivered to your door instead of buying it at a central shop, or that it's actually efficient to have a single van deliver all of that stuff instead of having everybody get in their own car to drive to the shop. I guess it depends on whether you need a car to go to the shop or not.

In any case, there's lots of experimentation with ever larger cargo bikes in order to try to keep city deliveries by bike. Still, we do get a lot of delivery vans in our street.

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